ADL's curious indifference ends on Armenian genocide

Andrew Bostom and I both found it very strange that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) could not bring itself to condemn the genocide against the Armenians perpetrated by Turkey almost a century ago. The AP reports:

The Anti-Defamation League has reversed itself and decided to call a World War I-era massacre in Armenia a genocide.

This after one Massachusetts community pull out of the ADL's No Place for Hate anti-bigotry program and others were considering doing the same. [....]

ADL president Abe Foxman said the organization changed its position after he consulted with historians, and his friend Eli Weisel.

He said that though the ADL acknowledges the genocide, it does not support a Congressional resolution to call it one.

This looks a lot to me like a damage-control operation, now that the ADL's stance has been publicized. Given that the organization is still against a Congressional resolution, it looks like politics has a lot to do with its stance. It may well be that it believes official condemnation would push Turkey further toward Islamist rule.

While that may be valid pragmatic concern, a genocide is still a genocide, where or not it is politically convenient to speak the truth. I always thought the ADL was supposed to be in the moral truth-telling business. After all, it expects to be taken seriously as a moral force, it needs to be.

But if it is an organization which is in the business of politics, and what it calls genocide depends on political convenience, that is another matter entirely. So I believe the organization needs to clarify why it now believes the Armenian genocide was a genocide, and why it deosn't want Congress calling it that.

Andrew Bostom and I both found it very strange that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) could not bring itself to condemn the genocide against the Armenians perpetrated by Turkey almost a century ago. The AP reports:

The Anti-Defamation League has reversed itself and decided to call a World War I-era massacre in Armenia a genocide.

This after one Massachusetts community pull out of the ADL's No Place for Hate anti-bigotry program and others were considering doing the same. [....]

ADL president Abe Foxman said the organization changed its position after he consulted with historians, and his friend Eli Weisel.

He said that though the ADL acknowledges the genocide, it does not support a Congressional resolution to call it one.

This looks a lot to me like a damage-control operation, now that the ADL's stance has been publicized. Given that the organization is still against a Congressional resolution, it looks like politics has a lot to do with its stance. It may well be that it believes official condemnation would push Turkey further toward Islamist rule.

While that may be valid pragmatic concern, a genocide is still a genocide, where or not it is politically convenient to speak the truth. I always thought the ADL was supposed to be in the moral truth-telling business. After all, it expects to be taken seriously as a moral force, it needs to be.

But if it is an organization which is in the business of politics, and what it calls genocide depends on political convenience, that is another matter entirely. So I believe the organization needs to clarify why it now believes the Armenian genocide was a genocide, and why it deosn't want Congress calling it that.